On Route 15, a Question of Safety

"You have to be careful and think: The measures that you're putting up -- will they really address the operational things that are going on out there?" Zeller said. "You have to look at the accident and decide, was that just an isolated tragedy or part of a pattern where guardrails or lighting or painting the road might help make it safer?"

When it was constructed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Route 15 stretched through largely rural rolling hills north toward the Maryland state line. Decades later, the road itself remains unchanged, but rapid growth has made the surrounding countryside almost unrecognizable and has increased traffic.

In 1995, about 10,000 vehicles a day traveled along the 10-mile stretch of Route 15 from the bypass to the Maryland line. Last year, a little more than twice that many vehicles a day traveled along just the 5.5-mile section of the road between the bypass and Lucketts Road, according to VDOT data.

"You have the potential for fender benders. You have bumper-to-bumper traffic every day, and all of the traffic is coming south from Maryland in the morning and going north in the evening," Reid said.

Zeller agreed that Route 15 has far more traffic than the road was designed to handle. He said that although VDOT had recently painted new lines near the bypass split indicating the direction of the bypass turnoff, last week's fatal accident was a sign that safety issues at that spot still needed to be studied.

"People weren't paying attention, and they discovered that they needed to be in the right lane, so they would be like, 'Oh, my gosh, I got to get over,' and then would jerk the wheel and bad things would happen," he said.

It was unclear Friday whether Dustin, who got his driver's license in March, found himself in such a situation as he approached the bypass split, moments before the accident. Witnesses said he appeared to be driving at the posted speed limit of 45 mph.

"It's just tragic what happened there," Reid said.